Sexual violence in Indian cities

A Gallup
poll finding that women in Rwanda and Bangladesh felt safer on the streets than
women in the UK and Sweden needs to be treated with great caution. There is no correlation between 'feeling safe' and the objective reality of whether women are actually safe or not, says Rahila
Gupta.

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In a recent article on openDemocracy arguing that the pornification of
Western culture undermines women’s fight for equality, Markha Valenta quoted a
Gallup poll carried out in 143 countries in support of her argument.. The poll
found that women in countries like Rwanda and Bangladesh felt safer on the
streets than women in developed Western countries like the UK, America or
Sweden. Really? Valenta uses these
findings to ask Western politicians, ‘Why did they not feel deep shame
that countries poorer, many much more religious, some even totalitarian, offer
women so much more safety and comfort in public spaces?... How many would dare
to say, as they ought to, that when it comes to public space, we must create
environments as safe for women as they are in Ghana, in Bangladesh, in China?’

There is no correlation between
‘feeling safe’ and the objective reality of whether women are actually safe or
not as the readers of that article pointed out. In the UK alone, we have seen
that women’s anxiety about safety exists in inverse proportions to the crime
rate: anxiety rises even as crime rates fall. According to the poll, in the UK,
62% of women feel safe as compared to 82% of men, a gap of 20 per cent, whereas
in India 69% of women as compared to 71% of men, a gap of only 2 per cent, feel
safe walking alone at night. At the same time, a Trust Law/Reuters survey found that India was the worst of the G20 countries
for violence against women, after Saudi Arabia. Either Indian women are
deluded or such surveys need to be unpacked and treated with caution because
incidents of violence against women in Indian cities are rife.

Newspapers report that women are
snatched off the streets in Delhi and gang raped in moving cars. The shocking
episode of a young woman being molested by a gang of 20 men outside a nightclub in Guwahati, Assam is
only the latest in a series of gruesome attacks. The men who lay in wait for
her had apparently harassed her inside the bar: because she had the ‘cheek’ to
rebuff them, they planned to teach her a lesson. Apparently, when a TV camera
crew turned up, they were trying to swing her around to face the cameras as a
form of public shaming for visiting a bar as an underage girl!

Much of the public debate that
followed was an agonised soul-searching about the nature of Indian society and
the ethics of non-intervention both by the journalists and random bystanders,
followed by the revelation that the news reporter himself egged the men on in
order to get his scoop which shifted the focus to press ethics. Whether the men
were egged on or not is a little beside the point: what is appalling is that
these men think that their gross actions are justified in the name of upholding
public morality by punishing the ‘bad’ women who frequent bars in order to
protect the ‘good’ women who remain indoors. Just like the code of ‘honour’ is
upheld by dishonourable means, notions of decency are upheld by indecent means.

It is the same frame of mind which
drives the zealous policeman of Mumbai, Vasant Dhoble, whose moral crusades
have taken him into bars to round up women drinkers and parade them in front of
cameras as ‘prostitutes’. In a case brought by two sisters against the police for wrongful
detention, the courts backed him saying that he was just doing his job.
Unsurprisingly members of religious groups have supported his Taliban style
policing. Women have been organising and fighting back. In January 2009, 40 men from a right wing
Hindu group, Sri Ram Sena (Ram’s army), attacked women, who had ordered beer
along with their lunch in Mangalore, so viciously that it resulted in two women
being hospitalised. Video footage of this episode went viral, as did the
humorous and innovative Pink Chaddi (knickers) campaign organised by the
ironically named Consortium of Pub-going, Loose, and Forward Women. They encouraged their supporters to send pink knickers to the
leader of the Sri Ram Sena: 2000 knickers of a target of 5000 were sent.

Whilst safety has always been a
problem for women on the streets of Indian cities, this kind of vigilante
action is relatively new and appears to be more prevalent in those cities where
economic development has exploded since the 1990s, when new economic policies
marked the end of the siege economy, opened India up to foreign investment and
created employment for educated, young women to work in call centres and
transnational manufacturing zones.
Mumbai, as the primary commercial city of India, contributing the most
to national revenue, has bucked the trend: it has a long tradition of women
going out to work, cultural attitudes have had a chance to catch up which means
that it has proved to be one of the safer cities in India for women, thuggish
policemen notwithstanding. But the rapid and uneven transition in other cities has not only forced a realignment of the interface
between the public and private domains but created starkly different
communities with starkly different value systems – India shining,
technologically advanced, leading the field in the new economies and the old
India driven by superstition, religion and conservatism. Although these
binaries are not mutually exclusive, it has given rise to parallel, niche
lives. Women find themselves trapped in
an explosive mix of traditional attitudes and new roles when overlapping
economic and social systems – feudalism, agrarian economy and neo-liberal
capitalism – come crashing into each other.

These different Indias, living side
by side, are like gated communities rarely interacting with each other, but
when they do the consequences can be dire. If the young woman in Guwahati had
been taken home by a chauffeur driven car, a facility available to most middle
class women, she would have escaped that mauling. Gurgaon, a satellite city of Delhi, crammed full of malls and
transnational companies built on agricultural land epitomises this clash. In
the remains of the agricultural community not yet displaced by technological
developments, there are high levels of female infanticide, caste violence and
women trafficked from even poorer parts of the country to make up for the
shortage of brides caused by infanticide. At the same time, women working in
the malls and transnational companies, who frequent pubs after work, are
exposed to harassment and violence from men because, ‘Public spaces have historically been thought of as male spaces and Gurgaon's men find
it particularly difficult to deal with the fact that an increasing number of
women - armed with their own resources - seek to share such spaces on equal
terms.’
However, those women workers who use private transport like taxis and
company cars provided by their
transnational employers to go home are less likely to face harassment.

The police are often slow to act, not
just because of corruption, but because like Vasant Dhoble, they may share the
views of the perpetrators of such harassment that a bar is no place for a
woman. And when such thinking is rubberstamped by religious forces, also on the
rise because neo-liberalism rolls back the state and creates a vacuum for the
growth of religious fundamentalism, then Indian women, who choose not to
conform, place themselves beyond the pale. Whatever the Gallup poll may say,
the truth is that public spaces in India are more hostile to women than the
streets of Europe and recourse to the law even weaker.

This article was first published in September 2012. It is republished here as part of the series, 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence

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